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Tag Archives: Christine Lagarde

Climate change: we don’t need no stinkin’ advice!

The United Nations Climate Change Conference will be held in Paris, France in 2015. The conference objective is to achieve a binding and universal agreement on climate, from all the nations of the world.

One of the world’s foremost climate scientists, James Hansen, has suggested that

“If leading nations agree in 2015 to have internal rising fees on carbon with border duties on products from nations without a carbon fee, a foundation would be established for phaseover to carbon free energies and stable climate.”

Head of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde, told a conference in February

“Overcoming climate change is obviously a gigantic project with a multitude of moving parts. I would just like to mention one component of it—making sure that people pay for the damage they cause. We are subsidizing the very behaviour that is destroying our planet, and on an enormous scale. Both direct subsidies and the loss of tax revenue from fossil fuels ate up almost $2 trillion in 2011—this is about the same as the total GDP of countries like Italy or Russia.”

In recent weeks UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, US Secretary of State John Kerry and World Bank President Jim Yong Kim have all called on countries and business to take the threats posed by global warming more seriously. Jim made what many believe was an historic call for investors to consider ditching holdings in fossil fuel companies.

The IPCC released a paper on 30 January, 2014 stating

“Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea level has risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased.

Total radiative forcing is positive, and has led to an uptake of energy by the climate system. The largest contribution to total radiative forcing is caused by the increase in the atmospheric concentration of CO2 since 1750.

Human influence on the climate system is clear. This is evident from the increasing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, positive radiative forcing, observed warming, and understanding of the climate system.

Continued emissions of greenhouse gases will cause further warming and changes in all components of the climate system. Limiting climate change will require substantial and sustained reductions of greenhouse gas emissions.”

On 4 March 2014, a new report released by the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO concludes the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is rising, and left unchecked further emissions will cause more warming this century.

“The report found that since the 1970s there had also been an increase in extreme fire weather, but predicted worse was to come. More extreme fire-weather days are slated for southern and eastern Australia, areas devastated by bushfires this spring and summer, with longer fire seasons in these regions to drag on. In bad news for farmers, a likely increase in drought frequency and severity is predicted as average rainfall in southern Australia decreases. Cyclones are expected to be fewer, but fiercer, while more extremely hot days and fewer cool days remain a reality on the horizon. The BoM and CSIRO said the record-breaking heatwaves like the kind that swept Australia the past two summers were “very unlikely to have been caused by natural variability alone”. Cutting global emissions would be crucial to preventing the worst global warming has in store, but that alone wouldn’t be enough, the science agencies warn. Adaptation is required because some warming and associated changes are unavoidable.”

The latest Global Legislators Organisation (Globe) study shows 64 out of 66 countries had put in place or were establishing significant climate or energy legislation in 2013, with almost 500 laws to tackle climate change being passed in countries which account for nine-tenths of global emissions.

“The organisation’s president, Lord Deben, who is also the chairman of the UK’s Committee on Climate Change which advises the government on the issue, said: “It is by implementing national legislation and regulations that the political conditions for a global agreement in 2015 will be created.

“We must see more countries develop their own national climate change laws so that when governments sit down in 2015 they will do so in very different political conditions to when they did in Copenhagen.”

I could go on quoting scientists, economists, experts, world leaders…the evidence is overwhelming, scientific consensus has been reached, and the warning has been issued along with a plan of attack. We can ask no more from our scientists. They have done their job. We now have to fight those increasingly rare fossils who would ignore the warning for short term gain for a very few individuals.

Rather than listening to experts and the rest of the world, Tony Abbott, to quote Lord Deben, relied on the “very dubious” work of a small minority of climate analysts, and his was “the last example of a government coming to power on the basis that really all this [climate change] is nonsense”.

In 2009 on Four Corners , Abbott described scientists from the IPCC as

”the people who will tell you as if it’s as obvious as night following day that we have a huge problem and that unless we dramatically change the way we live, life as we know it will be under massive threat. As I said, there’s an evangelical fervour about those people which you don’t normally associate with scientists.

I think that in response to the IPCC alarmist – ah, in inverted commas – view, there’ve been quite a lot of other reputable scientific voices. Now not everyone agrees with Ian Plimer’s position, but he is a highly credible scientist and he has written what seems like a very well-argued book refuting most of the claims of the climate catastrophists.”

When Tony Jones asked Tony Abbott in a Lateline interview in November 2009 if he had read the IPCC report on global warming he replied “No, I don’t claim to have immersed myself deeply in all of these documents. I’m a politician. I have to rely on briefings – I have to rely on what I pick up through the secondary sources. “

When asked if he’d read Plimer’s book he said “I’ve quoted a couple of passages, and I confess I’m probably more familiar with the book through people who’ve written about it than I am through having read it myself.”

You will hear Ian Plimer quoted by Tony Abbott, Andrew Bolt, Alan Jones, Gina Rinehart, and pretty much everyone that thinks climate change is crap. As with all supposedly “reputable scientific voices” in the denial camp, following the money always leads to the same place.

Prof Plimer is a geologist who currently serves on the board of stock exchange-listed miners Ivanhoe Australia and Silver City Mines, and has held previous board roles at CBH Mining and a number of other Australian mining companies. The companies he is involved with mine minerals including gold, zinc, copper and uranium, in Australia, Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

According to disclosures made to the Australians Securities and Investments Commission, Professor Plimer was appointed by Gina Rinehart to the boards of Roy Hill Holdings and Queensland Coal Investments on January 25 2012 which plans to export 55 million tonnes of iron ore a year through Port Hedland when it is up and running at full capacity.

He is also listed as a member of Mrs Rinehart’s Australians for Northern Development and Economic Vision (ANDEV) lobby group, which has taken strong positions on corporate taxation and climate change initiatives.

Aside from Mr Plimer, we have had Cardinal Pell give a submission on climate change to the Senate, and then give the 2011 annual Global Warming Policy Foundation speech in London that was described by climate researchers as “dreadful”, “utter rubbish” and “flawed”.

“Church leaders in particular should be allergic to nonsense….. I am certainly sceptical about extravagant claims of impending man-made climatic catastrophes. Uncertainties on climate change abound … my task as a Christian leader is to engage with reality, to contribute to debate on important issues, to open people’s minds, and to point out when the emperor is wearing few or no clothes.”

Cardinal Pell’s ‘evidence’ all comes from The Hancock Free Enterprise Lecture, University of Notre Dame, Fremantle, June 2011 delivered by none other than Lord Monckton and sponsored and attended by Gina Rinehart. Monckton is a fruitcake that is always good for a laugh, but hardly someone who should be advising on anything other than propaganda machines.

And then of course, we have Maurice Newman, Tony’s business adviser, who as head of the ABC in 2010, decided that denialists needed more airtime and so Monckton flooded the MSM, especially the ABC, all of whom basically ignored James Hansen who was touring at the same time.

In January this year, Mr Newman, in a column published in The Australian newspaper wrote that the

“climate change establishment (whatever that is) is intent only on exploiting the masses and extracting more money. The United Nations has applied mass psychology through a compliant media (he really did write that) to fool the world into thinking the activities of industrialised countries have changed the climate. The scientific delusion, the religion behind the climate crusade, is crumbling,”

Who needs a Climate Change Authority or Department of the Environment when you have Plimer, Pell, Newman and Monckton? We also have Greg Hunt’s Direct Action Plan to look forward to if they ever decide to introduce it.

So shut up all you tree-hugging socialists….

We don’t need no stinkin’ advice!